I’d lived in the New York area an entire year when my grandmother asked me if I’d ever visited Flushing, the Queens neighborhood where she’d once lived. I told her I hadn’t. When she asked why, I mentioned the distance from my apartment in Yonkers to her old house at the end of the 7 train. But a chronic lack of time wasn’t the only reason I hadn’t gone. I also feared draining the house of its symbolic meaning.

Although I grew up in Phoenix, I’d heard about my New York roots all my life. There was Cannon Street on the Lower East Side, where my grandmother was born. There was Canarsie, Brooklyn, where my mother was born. And there was Flushing, where my mother’s family had its first house, the house where they lived until escaping to the Southwest in 1969. Even in the scorching desert, Grandma Sylvia and Uncle Sheldon referenced the Flushing house, a five-bedroom stand-alone with a yard, as if it were down the street. The talk was always about how the area was partially rural when they moved there from Brooklyn in 1950, about the large Jewish and Italian populations, and how Flushing hosted the World’s Fair in 1939 and 1964. “When we moved there,” Grandma liked to say, “it was the country, and we were moving up in the world.” Each of these homes formed one locus in the triad of sacred places that defined my family’s mythology. Like their loud voices and Yiddish sayings, their history formed part of my identity: No matter how little I really knew about New York for the one year I lived there, I could always say that “my family is from here.”

Like the children of many European Jewish immigrants, my grandmother was born in a tenement. “Cannon Street, 96 Cannon Street,” she said over and over throughout my life. “I can still picture it in my mind.” When she was 2 or 3, in the early 1920s, her family moved to Brownsville, Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River. By then, Brownsville had acquired a reputation as a notorious Jewish slum rife with organized crime, yet in the words of Grandma Sylvia, “It was an upgrade.”

The closest I’d ever been to Brownsville was Alfred Kazin’s memoir A Walker in the City, partly about growing up in Brownsville in the decades before the Great Depression. But my grandmother’s childhood secured her and my place in the great story of the Jewish-American Diaspora, the saga of migration, alienation, aspiration, assimilation, which is itself a quintessential New York story. Tenements, the Williamsburg Bridge, upward social mobility via eastward borough mobility—the touchstones of her early life are now the easy symbols of the immortal Gotham tale, elements so familiar that they have become clichés. Yet for someone born in the American West like me, her cultural DNA seemed to provide my pedigree as a Jewish New Yorker.

In 2007, less than a year after I’d moved back to Phoenix, I visited New York to see jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins play a historic concert, and I decided at last, at age 32, to make a pilgrimage to reclaim my heritage.

***

Rather than travel all the way to Flushing, I decided to find my grandma’s birthplace on the Lower East Side. Unfortunately, Cannon Street didn’t appear on the maps I checked. Everyone I asked responded with some variation of, “No, never heard of it.” This was before Google Maps became sophisticated, but research revealed the street’s general location: It was down by the Williamsburg Bridge, not far from the East River. Grandma had always said she was born by the Williamsburg Bridge. The street had to be somewhere nearby.

Cannon Street sits in that easternmost corner of the city where the great curve of lower Manhattan Island—the tip of which was known as Corlears Hook during Dutch and British times—breaks SoHo and Chinatown’s orderly grid into a wedge of sideways streets. The FDR winds by like some gray buoyant boom trying to keep the neighborhood’s innards from spilling into the East River, while Delancey Street funnels traffic into Brooklyn. Delancey is one of the main filaments that holds together this edge space of triangles and trapezoids. Other than residents, few yupsters or shoppers have reason to venture this far. There’s no good Chinese food here, no row of art galleries or boutiques. All of the Lower East Side’s remaining ethnic landmarks—Guss’s Pickles, Kossar’s Bialys—are further west. But I had a reason. This sense of purpose and provenance filled me with an almost smug privilege as the B train rattled down its tracks toward Houston Street.

I got off at Broadway-Lafayette and walked to Katz’s Delicatessen. Katz’s may be a culinary landmark, but it’s also a symbol of the neighborhood’s Jewish history. I ordered an oversized brisket sandwich heaped with mustard and sauerkraut and three fat pickles. Even this lunch, I told myself, was part of my heritage.

The Lower East Side was ground zero of the Jewish Diaspora, a homeland before Israel, for it was here that many of the Jews who fled Europe’s anti-Semitism in the late 19th century and early 20th century started their new lives. Like most new immigrants, Jews associated largely with fellow Jews, acclimating to their new home by seeking the old country’s food, language, and customs. The Lower East Side became a neighborhood where, in the words of historian Hasia R. Diner, “Jews lived in a universe of almost total Jewishness.” Yiddish was primarily spoken; the hybrid language helped bridge communication gaps between Russians, Germans, and Poles. It also helped create “a foreign land right in the midst of America.” In 1900, these Jewish tenements contained 640,000 people in one square mile, the densest population at that point in history.

From Katz’s I walked south on Essex, once a major local thoroughfare, and east on Delancey. The further I walked, the less hopeful I became. Because my grandma’s dementia was worsening, I wondered if she might have mixed up location details. The neighborhood was depressing, an industrial forest of brown, brick projects and a few small trees, hardly a historic or visibly distinguished area.

In the shadow of one project, I asked a young man for directions. “Cannon Street?” He squinted his eyes. “Nah, man,” he said. “And I’ve lived here pretty much my whole life.”

I continued east, toward the thick scent of river water blowing between buildings. Then it appeared: a tiny green sign to my right listing Cannon Street. I turned to face it. Cannon was less than half a block long. It was sandwiched between a parking garage and an elementary school, and there were no tenement buildings here, no historic residences of any kind, only rows of projects rising in every direction, indisputably Soviet in their bleak utilitarianism.

I straightened my posture and walked along Cannon. Craning my neck in search of addresses, I scanned the garage’s weathered back side, staring as if the building would suddenly fade into a tenement the longer I looked. In a matter of steps the street ended at Broome, and I turned back around. I must have appeared confused, because a man standing on the front stairs of the school asked if I was looking for something. “Yeah, 96 Cannon Street,” I said. “My grandma was born there in 1919, and I wanted to see the building, take a picture for her. Know where 96 would be?”

He descended the steps and stood beside me, shaking his head. “This is all the Cannon Street there is.” He waved his arm north to south. “From that to that.” He introduced himself as Norris, the superintendent of Florence Nightingale Elementary, P.S. 110. “Most likely they tore yours down to build that,” he said, pointing to the closest brown tower. “Hard to say.”

He offered to show me the blueprints and old area photos that the school kept on file. “We’ve got ’em upstairs,” he said. “Any other day, just tell me the next time you’re coming.” He liked the idea that I’d come to take photos for my grandma and to understand our family history. “My grandmother,” he said, “lived to be 104. And my son—he’s 30 now—went to school right here.” After we shook hands, he went inside and left me wondering what to do. So, I photographed the street and the school, even photographed the projects and garage, all of it and its meaning dwarfed by the soaring steal mass of the bridge. I stood and stared. This was a weird little street.

Cannon wasn’t Manhattan’s shortest street. That title often went to Weehawken in the West Village, though some argued that Moore Street, in Battery Park, was shorter. Others said Edgar Street downtown was the shortest, though thanks to its size and configuration, Edgar hardly resembled a street, more just the lanes feeding a parking structure. But I didn’t care about those obscure names. They were bits of someone else’s mythology.

I shuffled back down Lewis, feeling thwarted in a way beyond defeat. What had I expected? To walk past Essex and find a preserved tenement etched with a large bronze “96,” in a streetscape like those described in Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon? This wasn’t a Martin Scorsese film set. This was the other quintessential New York story, the story of New York the recycler, New York the perpetually reborn.

As Cynthia Ozick said in the opening lines of her New Yorker essay “The Synthetic Sublime”: “More than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears. It disappears and then it disappears again; or say that it metamorphoses between disappearances, so that every 75 years or so another city bursts out, as if against nature—new shapes, new pursuits, new immigrants with their unfamiliar tongues and worried uneasy bustle.” In Through the Children’s Gate, Adam Gopnik expressed this phenomenon another way: “There is always a new New York coming into being as the old one disappears.” Which is also true of ideas: Hundreds of writers and thinkers have stated this same simple fact in their own way countless times before, because my sense of loss, and the city’s fundamental dynamism, exists on a continuum of loss and gain stretching back through the modern waves of immigration, to the Indians who lost their land to the Dutch. I shouldn’t have needed to traipse all the way down Delancey to discover this, the obvious truth of countless New York books and movies. But it wasn’t truth that I was after.

I’d assumed I was trying to educate myself about my origins, yet only after circumstance deprived me did I realize my true goal. I wanted to feel that I finally belonged to this city, to relate as something other than a fleeting, one-time commuter who forged his own fabricated rootedness from other peoples’ stories. I wanted to feel that there was more to my connection here than an aging bloodline. If I could touch some part of the old metropolis—a house, a brick, just one iconic building like the ones on nearby Pitt Street—I could truly inhabit the family triptych and tell myself and everyone thereafter, “That is where I’m from.” Instead, all I had was another clichéd Gotham story—the failed pilgrimage—as well as the old one: my grandmother, daughter of immigrants.

***

A few years later, on a frigid winter day, I tried another pilgrimage—this time to Flushing. I pulled up my coat collar and stepped from the 7 train into a bustling streetscape. Bright banners overhung storefront windows, their Chinese characters trailing vertically alongside melting sleet. Thanks to recent immigration from all parts of China, Flushing now housed the second-largest Chinatown in the city, second only to the one in lower Manhattan. It was a thriving, fascinating place. My mother wouldn’t recognize it, though she would love to see it.

I ate hand-pulled noodles in the Chinese food court of the Golden Mall and studied my map. When I returned to the surface, though, I reconsidered my plan. It was late. The bus route I’d mapped to the Flushing house was too convoluted to be much use at this hour. The distance was too far to walk, the air too frigid. My best bet was a cab, although in rush hour traffic, a ride would be expensive. It seemed wasteful to come this far and not visit the house, even tragic, yet I still refused to go. After the previous disappointment at Cannon, I wasn’t eager for another letdown. And really, what was there to see? My grandmother’s birthplace was gone, and even though my mother’s childhood home still stood, what did I expect it to show me? The Jewish-Italian Flushing wasn’t the Flushing of these Chinese residents any more than modern Flushing was my mother’s. Yellow cabs lined the street, but rather than flag one, I returned to the 7 train. And even as I did it, I thought of that day at Cannon.

Projects loomed around me. A pigeon flapped down the street. Instead of walking toward Brooklyn and the river, I walked the other way, toward Kossar’s Bialys and away from an idea that would remain, like so much of this city to those of us who never really lived here, a myth, bits of someone else’s childhood, yet still central to my own.

A different version of this essay originally appeared in Black Warrior Review.

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Aaron Gilbreath has written for the New York Times, Bookforum, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, The Believer, Vice , and Oxford American and wrote the musical appendix for The Oxford Companion to Sweets. His book This Is: Essays on Jazz comes out soon.